SOMEONE TOLD ABE that Declan Driscol was on a concert tour of Germany, but he couldn’t have been because Abe saw him one evening on the Festival Terrace at the South Bank. A crowd of mesmerised passers-by had gathered in a semicircle round him and another group were sitting on the steps of Hungerford footbridge. Abe joined the outer part of the circle and looked on. Declan’s long fingers were buckled over his recorder. He sucked in his cheeks until they nearly touched. Abe liked Pachelbel’s Canon – the eight notes that repeated for ever – but he felt apart from whatever was drawing the crowd. He kept his mouth closed and hummed along, ‘Declan Driscol still owes me a fiver; Declan Driscol still owes . . .’ He hadn’t seen Declan for months. He had left Iverdale Road one day and never come back. Declan had once spoken of ‘the path to improvisation’. Abe supposed he was now on it – whatever it was.
Abe was in a strange mood. The house-warming period had come to an end. He couldn’t afford to give any more parties. He couldn’t afford to go out. He had overspent. For the first time since he was about eight years old he stopped thinking about sex in a spirit of curiosity – when and how it would happen. At home, he set fire to small bits of paper in ashtrays – pieces of till roll that had ended up in his pocket, receipts and tube tickets. Declan’s dusty Irish drifter looks, as he played his recorder by the Thames, had no effect on him. Abe felt as unresponsive as a piece of old toast.
Needing to do something real, Abe gave in his notice to the health insurance company. His meeting with the boss was a waste of time – not worth psyching himself up for. Liam was genial and nodded to show he was listening. He didn’t try to persuade Abe to stay or insist he take gardening leave. He smiled when he opened the door to show Abe out and gave him a comradely cuff on the back. Abe wandered across to the lift, got out at the third floor and walked back to his office. That was it: over like a jab at the doctor’s. Four years ended in five minutes. Holly came across and hugged him and said that if he was going she would quit too. Then she went off to a meeting. Ben had already left for a presentation in the Midlands.
Abe expected to feel elated at the prospect of freedom but instead he found himself living in a kind of border zone, which he wasn’t allowed to leave and where very little went on. He commuted to Reading from Monday to Friday as usual, but every day he felt as if he had made a bad choice of holiday – arriving in a grey place in dull weather. In less than a month he would be gone. Away from the pictures of tanned young men lying on daybeds in their boxer shorts and Grandma doing a more than competent star jump in a pair of bright pyjamas – those fit types who sexed up not only the client brochures but also the company documents, the interior walls of the building, the inside of the lift. He wanted to scrawl BOLLOCKS across them with an indelible pen. He wondered whether car insurance might not, in fact, be a cleaner sort of business. At least no one ever suggested that cars enjoyed going in for repair.
The Saturday after Abe had resigned, Gloria asked herself over to Iverdale Road. She turned up in the afternoon. Abe went into the kitchen to make some tea and when he came back, holding two mugs, Gloria was sitting very upright, perched on the edge of his sumptuous vintage swivel chair. Abe had bought the chair in Hoxton. It was velvety, the colour of blackberries and covered in silvery diamond-shaped stitching. Gloria wasn’t taking advantage of the chair’s swivelling properties. ‘You’re in debt, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Anyway.’
Abe knew Gloria’s habit of asking a question as if she were a telephone waking him in the night, but he was still caught off guard. ‘I’ve got a loan from the bank. Don’t worry about it. I spoke to a woman and it’s cool.’ He handed her one of the mugs.
‘Thank you. What was her name?’
‘Whose name?’
‘The woman at the bank.’
Abe walked across the room and sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘I don’t know. Gemma or something. Yes, I think it was Gemma,’ he said.
Gloria always wanted to know everyone’s name. It came from teaching and dealing with the public. Without names you were shouting into the wind. Gloria worked at a beauty treatment centre and had certificates to prove her competence in laser hair removal, non-surgical face lifts, waxing, piercing. She also taught in local authority adult education classes. ‘Singing for Everyone’ it was called in the brochure. She had been a singer once – folk and jazz – and had done a few festivals. ‘Everyone’ was the category Abe fell into. He could sing along but not sing. If his mum and sister were in any sense artists, he was stuck with the colouring in.
‘She was nice to you, was she? Helpful?’ Gloria asked, with an edge to her voice.
‘Yes, really nice,’ he said.
‘Do you have credit cards, Abe?’
‘Only a couple. They’re not a problem.’
Gloria suited the chair: tiny and symmetrical in the centre of it, her feet, in a pair of red leather boots, neatly lined up and barely touching the floor. Though slight, with a skin like thin ice, she had always been as strong as two parents combined. When he was a little boy Abe had focused on her blemishes. The freckle on her left cheekbone that was larger than the general peppering on her translucent skin, the bottom front teeth that slightly overlapped, the scar on the back of her head that she had acquired from falling backwards off a wall and which Abe had only been able to find by pulling different sections of her hair apart at the roots. But since he had stopped examining her so closely he had seen that she was, for a human being, remarkably harmonious. Only cats stared at you with such levelness.
‘You look sweet sitting there, Mum,’ he said. ‘I might give you that chair.’
‘Have you even looked for another job?’ she asked.
‘’Course I have. I’ve got all sorts of ideas.’
‘Anything real?’
‘Well, obviously nothing definite, because travelling up and down to Reading and working all day long I can’t go looking in a real way.’ He paused. ‘This is really tedious. Can we stop talking about it?’
Gloria’s only mushiness had started in New Age bookshops. She browsed in several sections, including channelling, crystals and subtle energy. She collected magical and spiritual texts. They originated from various sources, Egyptian, Celtic, Native American. On balance, Gloria favoured the Egyptian. She set the words to chants and practised her singing on them – musical sun salutations – up and down the keys. She answered ads in esoteric magazines to gather more material: Harness the Power of Ba, Heart-weighing: are you ready for it?, Hen kai pan: beginners welcome (we’re all beginners!). The leaflets turned up in her house, slipped behind radiators or wedged in the windows as draught preventers. Abe thought the hobby was barmy but he understood that a person can’t be strong in every area of life. Something has to give.
‘How’s the chanting going?’ Abe asked.
Gloria ignored him. ‘Why are you stopping work, Abe?’
‘No particular reason. I’ve been there long enough. Four years.’
‘You worry me.’
‘Don’t waste yours.’ Gloria got up from the chair and started wandering around the room. Her boots were flat with soft soles and hardly made a sound as she walked across the boards. Abe saw her twice over, once in reality and once reflected in the huge, driftwood-framed mirror that covered one wall. The window frames were rotting; it was depressing to see an extra set of them. Certain aspects of the Iverdale Road house were starting to grate on Abe. His pieces of furniture, from interesting parts of London, deserved better than the tatty shell that contained them. It was like having a mouth full of expensive dentistry in a scarred, sunken face.
Gloria didn’t glance at her reflection. For someone who worked part-time in the beauty trade she was surprisingly unconcerned about looks. Nor, at that moment, did she seem interested in Abe’s daybed or matt nickel floor lights – his last purchases before the money ran out. Abe had tidied up before she arrived. He had collected up the ashtrays, full of charred pieces of paper. There was nothing out of place.
Gloria picked up one of the lemons that was lying in a black enamelled bowl on the table, rubbed it between her hands and sniffed it. ‘Abe, is there a cigarette?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I’ll get you one. Sit down, Mum,’ he said. He went out of the room and came back with a single cigarette and a lighter. He threw them over to her one at a time. She caught them and stood contemplating him.
‘I go to Reading every single day,’ he said. ‘Even though I’ve given in my notice. Sometimes I feel like the office poltergeist, not truly there and banging into things. But I never miss.’
‘Congratulations,’ she said.
‘I agree. I’m fantastic.’
‘A fantasist, did you say?’ She lit the cigarette and, after a meditative in-breath, turned her head and exhaled away from where Abe was standing. The hand that she waved to one side was decorated with silver rings; the tips of her fingernails painted pearly white.
He remembered how she used to light her cigarettes from the front burner on the gas stove. She saw herself as an occasional smoker and never had matches or lighters. These were for addicts, not singers. When he was very young, she used to dance him round the living room on her shoulders, arms outstretched – flying, she called it. She sang as she danced and he heard the vibrations of sound coming out from the top of her head. On one occasion she was singing Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Carey’ and stopped in midline when Abe screamed. He had grabbed her hands and one of them was holding a cigarette. No one reached the Mermaid Café that day. A blister as big as a soap bubble came up in the middle of his palm.
‘But afterwards, Abe. When you have left. Don’t waste your time,’ Gloria said.
‘’Course not. ’Course not, Mum. That’s why I’m giving up work.’
She didn’t reply but her pencil-thin eyebrows moved, as if her brain were still having its say, although she, for reasons of her own, had decided to keep quiet. That was probably it, Abe thought, for the ticking off. He hoped she wouldn’t leave. She had only been there half an hour.
‘Shall I get my head shaved? What do you think?’ Abe smoothed his hands back from his forehead in an attempt to show how he would look with no hair.
‘If you like,’ Gloria said without even studying him. He never could engage her, only if he transgressed and then she was as alert as if she had spotted a hornet in the room. Once or twice a year he went back to Crystal Palace. He liked dipping into the old atmosphere – as if he were climbing into a familiar bath, then realising how cool the water had become. The decreasing temperature was part of the pleasure. His old bedroom had become storage, like one of those industrial cubes people rented. Gloria’s winter coat with its fake-fur collar and cuffs hung in his cupboard in summer and her floaty summer clothes, in burnished seventies colours, hung there in winter, together with the portable massage table, from the days when she had treated clients at home. But then he looked up and saw the lampshade. Same old red lampshade from Habitat, circa 1980, that had dangled there from the beginning – familiar as the moon but without waxing or waning. He felt nostalgic thinking about it. ‘Are you going to see Kirsty?’ he asked.
‘Is she in? She sometimes works on Saturday at that privatised post office.’
‘I don’t know. We could call her, ask her up.’ Abe picked up his phone and went over to the window. ‘She’s not answering.’
‘One of you on the dole and the other selling stamps,’ Gloria said.
When Abe turned round he saw that she had sat down on the swivel chair again. She had stubbed out the cigarette and retrieved the lemon. She was passing it from hand to hand.
‘Would you like some more tea, Mum?’ he asked.
‘Abe,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘Gemma.’
For a moment, Abe didn’t know who she was talking about. ‘Oh, you’re not on about the bank again, are you?’
‘She isn’t being nice or helpful. She is digging a pit and her sole aim and purpose is that you fall in it.’
‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? Stop worrying, Mum.’
Gloria said no to the tea – she was never big on tea – but she stayed ten minutes longer. After she had gone, Abe decided to meet Kirsty from work. He hadn’t seen her for a while. He missed her.
Abe caught a bus to the West End and walked along the backstreets away from the crowds. He hadn’t lost the habit of noticing men but it was an empty sport; more like watching nature programmes on TV than getting to know the tigers. He thought, with a touch of nostalgia, of his trip to Sudbury Hill. He remembered the snow. He wished another random journey might present itself. Richard had mentioned ‘meeting up again’, but that wasn’t what Abe had in mind. He didn’t plan to see Richard again.
Abe resolved to respond to the next man who showed a flicker of interest but in the ten minutes that followed he met no one, not even a traffic warden. He found the mail box premises and opened the door. Abe shared the view that his sister lacked ambition but he hadn’t reckoned with the effect of seeing Kirsty standing behind a counter under an international clock that gave the time in distant cities. She looked even slighter than usual in an oversized grey jumper which she wore with a string of iridescent beads. Her motive for suddenly dressing up as an aggregated gran and grandad, when she had the body of an elf, was a mystery to Abe. For a second he felt moved. He went to the far end of the shop and examined the stock on the shelves. The packing materials gave off a dead brown smell. He suspected that Kirsty enjoyed arranging the stationery in harmonious groups – comforted by the orderliness of ascending sizes of padded envelopes and the geometry of the flat-pack boxes. Some of the customers would have the same fetish. They would finger the goods but leave them tidy.
Several fat rolls of bubble wrap were propped up against the shelves. Abe peeled off a corner of the protecting wrapping and, pressing his thumb between the layers, popped a bubble. The noise it made was like the click of a door. Abe looked towards the counter to see if he had attracted Kirsty’s attention. Kirsty remained oblivious but the customer she was serving glanced over his shoulder. The man smiled at Abe. He was of what the police call ‘Mediterranean’ appearance, black-haired with neatly shaped fuzz in front of his ears. Abe smiled too. The man raised a finger discreetly, in mock admonition. Abe walked back to the counter. ‘She doesn’t mind. She’s my sister,’ he said.
‘Your sister?’ The man’s eyes moved from Abe to Kirsty and back.
‘Yes. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘Very beautiful. Maybe she will give me free photocopying.’
‘She’s my sister, not yours.’
The man laughed. Kirsty set her face into a cross mask. ‘It is good that you have such a brother,’ the man said, peeling a fifty-pound note from a wad in his wallet. ‘He looks after you good.’ He leant across the counter and proffered his hand. After the scant shake that Kirsty allowed him, the man turned to Abe. He gathered up Abe’s hands in both of his. Abe smelled peppery hair oil as the man leant towards him. ‘Thank you. Thank you. Very pleased to meet you. I will see you again. I am often here with the photocopying.’
‘Nice to meet you, too.’ Abe released his hands from the small butter-smooth ones. He walked over to the door of the shop and held it open. The man touched Abe’s arm and went out into the street. Abe returned to the counter.
Kirsty’s arms were folded inside the overlarge jumper. Her hands had disappeared. ‘Thanks, Abe. You’ve just made my life a whole lot easier.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I wanted to see you.’
They locked eyes, as if playing a game of who blinks first. Abe was the one to give in.
‘Why do you come on to pathetic random people, Abe? What’s the point of it?’
‘I never came on to him,’ Abe protested. ‘I never did a thing.’ He held up his hands.
Kirsty took a breath. ‘I do my best here, Abe. I try out my school French. I’ve bought an Arabic phrase book to help work out what people want. I’m polite and they’re polite and, from time to time, when they invite me to go out with them in their cars they are extra polite and make it easy for me to refuse them.’
‘All right,’ Abe said. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I’m just trying to explain that it’s better if no one gets excited.’
Abe shrugged his shoulders. ‘Fair enough. But that’s their problem, isn’t it? If they get excited?’
Kirsty turned away from him. She looked genuinely fed up, which wasn’t what he had intended.
‘Cheer up, Kirstabel. Let’s go and have a drink.’ He didn’t want her to cry.
‘I can’t, Abe. I can’t leave before six.’ A tear was halfway down her cheek.
‘Tomorrow, then. Let’s go and have a Sunday roast. We haven’t been out for ages.’
‘Sorry,’ Kirsty said. She paused. ‘I’ve asked Luka round.’
‘Are you two back together?’ Abe said.
‘No,’ she said, wiping her hand across her face.
Abe let out a long breath. ‘And you accuse me of making trouble?’